Sulu Series · Episode 5 — The Treaties That Ended a Sultanate: From the Steam Gunboat to the Carpenter Agreement (1848–1915)

Sulu Series — Episode 5 of 5. ← Previous: Episode 4: The Sulu Zone · You are at the end of the arc. Full arc: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5.

Continuing from this series: The Coast and the Mountain — Episode 1: Kahawa Sūg and the Coffee of the Blood Compact →

Two Sovereignties, One Story

The previous story in this series ended with a distinction that becomes structurally important here. The Sulu Sultanate possessed two kinds of sovereignty: a legal-formal sovereignty recognized by external powers, expressed in treaties and embodied in the person of the Sultan; and a lived communal sovereignty of the Tausug, Sama-Bajau, Iranun, and other peoples of the Sulu Zone, expressed in language, kinship, ritual, customary law, and the everyday governance of community life.

This story tracks the dismantling of the first. It is essential to say at the outset that it does not track the dismantling of the second, because the second was not dismantled — it was assaulted, marginalized, and pushed out of formal political form, but it survived. The stories told by colonial historians, who looked only at sultans and treaties, recorded the death of the Sultanate as if it were the death of Sulu. It was not. Sulu — the peoples and their lifeworld — continued.

What follows, then, is the legal-political story of the Sultanate’s end. The other story — the survival of Sulu beneath and beyond the Sultanate — runs parallel, and it cannot be told only through colonial documents because colonial documents do not contain it.

The Steam Gunboat

The structural end of the Sulu Zone as a sovereign maritime power was not a treaty. It was a piece of technology.

In the late 1840s, Spain began deploying steam-powered gunboats in operations against the Iranun and Balangingi raiding fleets. The strategic implications were immediate and brutal. The lanong and other Sulu Zone proa depended on the monsoon for long-range mobility. They were powerful when running with the wind, devastating when arriving on a coast at the right season, and effectively beached when the wind was wrong. The steam gunboat acknowledged none of these constraints. It could pursue a lanong upwind. It could intercept a raiding fleet returning home regardless of the season. It could bring concentrated artillery fire to bear at a chosen moment.

In 1848, Spanish forces under Governor-General Narciso Clavería conducted a major punitive operation against the principal Balangingi settlements at Balangingi Island. The settlements were destroyed; large numbers of Balangingi were killed or captured; survivors were deported to Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon, where their descendants still live as the Camucones community. A second campaign in 1851 broke the remaining centers. Within a decade of the first systematic steam gunboat operations, the Iranun-Balangingi raiding capacity that had sustained the Sulu Zone for a century was structurally broken.

The political consequences cascaded immediately. With the raiding economy destroyed, the trepang labor supply collapsed. With trepang exports falling, Sulu’s commercial weight in the China trade declined. With both legs of its economic foundation weakened, the Sultanate’s capacity to project power diminished. In 1851, Spanish forces re-occupied Jolo for the first time since the 1663 evacuation — an action that would have been militarily impossible against a Sulu Zone at full strength but that was now within Spanish reach.

The 188-year period of effective Sulu independence between the 1663 evacuation and the 1851 re-occupation — what we have called, in this series, the “two centuries of unobserved sovereignty” — was over. From this moment forward, the Sultanate would be progressively constrained by external power.

The 1878 Sabah Instrument: A Word in Two Languages

In January 1878, Sultan Jamalul A’lam of Sulu placed his seal on a document drafted by two European entrepreneurs: the Austrian-born Baron Gustavus von Overbeck and the British businessman Alfred Dent. The document concerned the territory of North Borneo — what is today the Malaysian state of Sabah — over which the Sultan claimed sovereignty by virtue of a 1704 grant from the Sultan of Brunei.

What the 1878 document did is the subject of one of the most consequential and unresolved diplomatic disputes in modern Southeast Asian history. The document exists in two languages, and the two languages do not say the same thing.

The English-language version drafted by Dent and Overbeck uses the verbs “cede” and “grant,” with the language of permanent transfer. The Sulu side’s accompanying documentation uses the Malay-Arabic term pajak. Pajak in the Sulu legal-commercial tradition denotes a lease or pawn — a transfer of usufruct with reversibility implied, in exchange for an annual payment. It is not the same as a sale or a permanent cession.

The annual payment of $5,000 Mexican silver dollars (later increased to roughly$ 5,300 and continuing into the present in different form) is consistent with a lease arrangement. A purchase would normally be a single payment, not a recurring annual one. The continuing payment, made first by the British North Borneo Chartered Company (which acquired Dent and Overbeck’s rights), then by the British colonial government, then by the independent state of Malaysia after 1963, has been characterized by successive Sulu claimants as evidence that the original instrument was a pajak, since otherwise no continuing payment would be owed.

The British and subsequently the Malaysian position is that the 1878 instrument was a cession, that the recurring payment is in the nature of a pension or honorarium, and that sovereignty over Sabah was permanently transferred. The Philippine government, on behalf of the Sulu heirs, has periodically asserted the pajak reading and the consequent continuation of Sulu sovereignty over the territory.

The dispute is not resolvable from the face of the document alone. It would require evidence of the parties’ intent at the time of signing — and that evidence, in the relevant fullness, does not exist. There is no transcript of the negotiations between Dent, Overbeck, and the Sulu court. The Sultan’s later statements, made under conditions of reduced political bargaining power, are ambiguous. The British-side correspondence consistently describes the transaction as a cession but the British side had a clear interest in that characterization.

What is unambiguous is the structural ambiguity itself. The 1878 instrument was drafted in a context where two parties used different legal-conceptual vocabularies — one drawn from European real-property law, the other from Malay-Islamic commercial law — to describe a single transaction, and the difference between the vocabularies was not reconciled. The dispute that this ambiguity produced is now in its second century. The territory has been governed by Britain, then by Malaysia, while the Sulu claim has continued through generations of heirs. The 2013 Lahad Datu standoff, in which descendants of the Sulu royal house attempted to physically reassert the territorial claim, is the most recent serious flare of the dispute.

Source-criticism card: the 1878 Sabah instrument

Custody chain: The English-language version is held in British colonial archives and reproduced in standard 19th-century compilations. The Malay-Arabic version was held by the Sulu court and has been reproduced in subsequent Sulu legal claims. The two versions are both “originals” in the sense that both bore the Sultan’s seal.

Tier: A — primary diplomatic document.

Reliability: HIGH for what was signed; CONTESTED for what was meant.

Use guidance: Always cite both versions. Always use the Malay-Arabic term pajak when discussing the Sulu side’s understanding. Never collapse the dispute by taking either side’s reading as obvious.

The American Inheritance and the Bates Treaty

In December 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States by the Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-American War. Article III of that treaty included Sulu within the territorial cession. There is a significant legal problem with this.

Spain did not have the legal authority to cede what it did not effectively possess. The 1851 re-occupation of Jolo had given Spain a fortified presence but not consolidated administrative control over the Sulu archipelago. The Sultanate continued to function. Customary and Islamic law continued to govern Tausug daily life. The Sultan continued to receive foreign envoys and to administer his court. By the standard of effective occupation that European international law of the period demanded for valid sovereignty claims, Spain’s possession of Sulu was, at best, partial and contested.

When the United States assumed its inherited claim, it discovered the practical reality almost immediately. American forces landed in Jolo in May 1899 and found themselves dealing with a functioning indigenous polity, not an administered colonial territory. The U.S. military commander on the scene, Brigadier General John C. Bates, was directed to negotiate.

The result was the Bates Treaty, signed on August 20, 1899, by Bates on behalf of the United States and by Sultan Jamalul Kiram II on behalf of Sulu. The treaty was bilingual (English and Tausug-Arabic) and consisted of twenty-one articles. Its key provisions were:

The Sultan and his datus accepted the sovereignty of the United States over the Sulu archipelago
The United States agreed to respect the Sultan’s authority over religious and customary matters and to pay regular salaries to the Sultan and principal datus
Slavery would not be abolished by force but would be addressed through compensated emancipation
The United States would not interfere with the religious practices of the Sulu people

Whether the Bates Treaty constituted a recognition of Sulu sovereignty or a protectorate arrangement was disputed from the moment of signing. The American negotiators framed it as a temporary expedient — a way to neutralize Sulu while the United States dealt with the larger Philippine-American War in Luzon. The Sultan and his court understood it as a treaty between sovereigns, with explicit recognition of his continued authority over religious and customary matters.

What is significant for the legal-historical analysis is this: by signing the Bates Treaty at all, the United States implicitly recognized the Sultan as a treaty-capable sovereign actor. One does not negotiate treaties with subordinates; one issues orders to them. The Bates Treaty’s existence is itself an admission that, as of 1899, the United States understood Sulu to require the form of inter-state diplomacy.

The treaty lasted five years. In 1904, the United States unilaterally abrogated it, declaring that the Bates Treaty was inconsistent with American sovereignty over the Philippines and that the Sultan’s continued authority was incompatible with the establishment of American colonial administration. The Sultan protested. He had no remedy. The abrogation, like the original treaty, was an act of unilateral American power.

But the abrogation revealed something important. By unilaterally abrogating a treaty with the Sultan, the United States acknowledged that a treaty had existed. That acknowledgment is not legally trivial. It means that the American legal claim to Sulu sovereignty in the period 1899–1915 was internally contradictory: the United States simultaneously claimed full sovereignty (under the Treaty of Paris) and recognized through its own acts that the Sultan held a competing sovereignty (by negotiating with him in 1899 and abrogating the agreement in 1904).

Bud Dajo, March 1906

The military endpoint of Sulu resistance to American sovereignty came on the slopes of Mount Dajo on the island of Jolo in early March 1906. Approximately 600 to 1,000 Tausug — men, women, and children — had taken refuge in the crater of an extinct volcano, refusing to submit to American disarmament orders and to the cedula (head tax) that the colonial administration had imposed.

Major General Leonard Wood ordered the position taken. American forces, supported by mountain artillery, climbed the slopes and assaulted the crater. The defenders, armed primarily with bladed weapons and a small number of firearms, were almost entirely killed. American casualties were approximately fifteen killed and seventy-five wounded. Estimates of Tausug dead range from approximately 600 to over 1,000.

Mark Twain, then a vocal anti-imperialist, wrote a savage commentary on the event, characterizing the official American military reports as celebrating a “glorious victory” over an enemy that included “six hundred women and children” who “could not surrender even if they had wanted to” because the crater offered no escape. The episode became, and remains, one of the iconic atrocities of American colonial history in the Philippines.

Bud Dajo did not formally end Sulu sovereignty. The Sultanate continued to exist. The cedula was successfully imposed, but the religious and customary authority of the Sultan remained legally untouched. What Bud Dajo did was demonstrate, with unmistakable clarity, that the United States possessed both the will and the means to impose its sovereignty by overwhelming force — and that armed resistance by Sulu communities would be met with annihilation.

The full scope and atrocity of Bud Dajo is treated in the broader context of Three Centuries of Moro Resistance. For the present story, its significance is narrower but consequential: after Bud Dajo, the political space for the Sultan to negotiate from a position of even residual military credibility was gone. The American demand for formal sovereignty termination could not be indefinitely deferred.

The Carpenter Agreement, March 1915

On March 22, 1915, in Zamboanga, Sultan Jamalul Kiram II of Sulu signed a memorandum of agreement with Frank W. Carpenter, the Governor of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu. The agreement is brief — fewer than 1,000 words in its operative provisions. In legal effect, it is the most consequential single document in modern Sulu history.

The Carpenter Agreement provided that:

The Sultan formally renounced his pretensions to civil and political sovereignty over the territory of the Sulu archipelago
The Sultan retained his standing as the religious head of the Mohammedan Church in the Sulu archipelago, with continuing authority over Islamic religious matters
The Sultan’s title and personal status were preserved
A pension would be paid to the Sultan in compensation for the surrendered authority
The agreement was made effective on the date of signing

For the first time in Sulu’s recorded history, a Sulu sovereign explicitly and in writing surrendered the political-civil sovereignty of the Sultanate. The Bates Treaty had been ambiguous. The Treaty of Paris had not involved Sulu consent at all. The Carpenter Agreement was the first instrument that both (a) was executed by an actual Sulu Sultan with at least nominal voluntariness and (b) explicitly addressed sovereignty in its political dimension.

This is why the conventional dating of “the end of the Sulu Sultanate” should be 1915, not 1898 or 1899 or 1906. The Treaty of Paris ceded a paper claim that Spain did not effectively possess. The Bates Treaty was a temporary expedient, not a sovereignty termination. Bud Dajo broke military resistance but did not extinguish legal title. The Carpenter Agreement is the only document that, by its own terms and by the standard of effective execution, actually does the legal work.

But notice carefully what the Carpenter Agreement does and does not do. It surrenders the political and civil sovereignty of the Sultanate. It explicitly preserves the religious sovereignty of the Sultan over Islamic religious matters. It does not — could not — surrender the lived sovereignty of the Sulu peoples over their own languages, their customary law, their kinship structures, their ritual life, their food order, or their relationship to their ancestors and their land.

These were not the Sultan’s to surrender. They had never been the Sultan’s. They had always belonged to the people who lived them.

The Sovereignty That Was Not Surrendered

This is the angle that the colonial documentary record will not give us, because the colonial documentary record was concerned almost exclusively with the Sultan and his treaty capacity. The Sultan’s signature on the Carpenter Agreement ends the Sultanate as a political entity. It does not end Sulu.

What did not end:

The Tausug language did not end. It continues to be spoken today by approximately 1.5 million people. It is a Central Philippine Austronesian language with deep roots in the archipelago — not a colonial residue, not a hybrid, but a continuous tradition.

The Sama-Bajau maritime culture did not end. The Sama people continue to live across the Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea, and the coastal regions of Sabah and eastern Indonesia. Their fishing, diving, and boat-building traditions continue.

Tausug customary law (adat) and Islamic law did not end. The Agi-agi sa Sug and the broader hybrid legal system that the Sultanate had institutionalized continued to govern most aspects of daily life in Sulu communities long after 1915 — and significant elements of it continue today, formally recognized in the legal architecture of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Halal food order did not end. The dietary boundary that distinguishes Muslim Sulu from Christianized lowland Filipinos has held continuously since its institutionalization in the 15th century. It remains intact today.

The ritual community organized around mosques, kanduli (the redistributive feast inherited from the Sultanate court), Friday observance, and the lifecycle rituals of birth, marriage, and death continued without interruption.

The kinship structures of bayanihan (mutual aid), utang na loob (debt of gratitude), datu-and-followers reciprocity, and the agama (lineage) systems continued to organize political and social life at the community level.

The relationship of Tausug, Sama, and Yakan peoples to their ancestors, their land, and their seas continued — encoded in oral tradition, in place-naming, in the cycles of the agricultural and fishing year, in the epic literatures (the Parang Sabil, the lifecycle of the Tausug warrior tradition), and in the everyday acts of dwelling.

None of these were on the table in March 1915. None of them required a Sultan’s signature. They were not the Sultan’s to give up. They were the inheritance of the Sulu peoples themselves, held collectively, and they were not surrendered because they were never asked for.

The Word Returned

There is one more thread to close. In Story 3 of this series — covering the Spanish-Moro Wars from 1578 to 1663 — we traced how the Spanish colonial administration imposed the term “Moro” onto the Muslim peoples of the southern Philippines, importing the religious-enemy vocabulary of the Iberian Reconquista and applying it to a non-European context. “Moro” was, in its origin, a colonial pejorative.

In 1969, in Manila, a young Tausug intellectual named Nur Misuari co-founded an organization called the Moro National Liberation Front. The choice of name was deliberate. Misuari and his colleagues took the colonial term, with full awareness of its Spanish origin, and reclaimed it as a positive self-designation for the pan-Muslim Filipino community. The MNLF was joined in 1977 by the breakaway Moro Islamic Liberation Front. By the late 20th century, “Moro” had been transformed from a colonial slur into an identity-positive political label adopted by the very communities it had been used to denigrate.

This is a small piece of the larger pattern. The colonial-era construction did not have the final word. The Sulu peoples — and the broader Bangsamoro communities of which they are part — took the language of their own oppression and made it the language of their own assertion.

The 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and the 2018 Bangsamoro Organic Law (Republic Act No. 11054) are, in this longer historical view, recognitions of a sovereignty that never actually ended. The political sovereignty of the Sultanate ended in 1915. The lived sovereignty of the peoples who had lived under it did not. It went underground, persisted in forms that colonial administrators could not see or did not bother to record, and re-emerged in the late 20th century as a political claim that the Republic of the Philippines was eventually compelled to acknowledge.

What 1915 Did and Did Not Do

The Carpenter Agreement is the legal terminus of the Sulu Sultanate. It is also a date that needs to be read carefully, because it did not do what later popular accounts often suggest it did.

It did not end Sulu as a polity, because Sulu as a polity had always been more than the Sultanate. The Sultanate was the apex of a layered structure that included datus, panglimas, kin-groups, religious authorities, customary courts, and the daily governance of community life. The apex was removed. The structure beneath it continued.

It did not end Sulu sovereignty in any meaningful sense for the people who lived in Sulu. Their sovereignty over their own language, religion, customary law, kinship, ritual, and daily life was untouched by the Carpenter Agreement because it was not the Sultan’s to surrender. They retained it. They retain it.

It did end the legal-formal sovereignty of the Sultan as a political actor in the international system. From 1915 forward, the Sultan of Sulu was a religious dignitary with no civil-political authority recognized by the colonial state or its successors. The Sultan-as-treaty-power, the Sultan as signatory of the 1761 alliance with Britain or the 1878 Sabah instrument, no longer existed in that capacity.

What 1915 did, in short, was complete the long colonial process of separating the legal-formal sovereignty of the Sulu Sultanate from the lived sovereignty of the Sulu peoples — and then extinguishing the first while leaving the second to fend for itself. The first death is what the colonial archive records. The second life is what the colonial archive cannot record because it does not have the categories for it.

This series has tried, throughout, to honor both. The Sultanate that began somewhere around 1450 and that ended in 1915 was a real political entity, with a real history, that deserves accurate description. The Sulu peoples whose history runs from before the Sultanate, through it, and beyond it are a different and longer story. To tell only the first is to participate in the colonial reduction. To tell only the second would be to lose the political precision that the documentary record permits. The honest historical task is to hold both — and to refuse the temptation to collapse either into the other.

In Dezhou, the tomb of Paduka Batara still stands. In the Sulu archipelago, the Tausug language is still spoken. Both are true. Both are continuous. Both are part of what Sulu means.

Quarantined Claims

Applying the framework laid out in Story 1, the following claims are explicitly excluded:

QUARANTINED: That the Carpenter Agreement “ended the Sulu Sultanate.” It terminated the legal-formal political sovereignty of the Sultanate; the religious and customary authority of the Sultan continued, and the lived sovereignty of the Sulu peoples was never on the table to surrender.
QUARANTINED: That the 1878 instrument was unambiguously a “sale” or “cession” of North Borneo. The English and Malay-Arabic versions use materially different vocabulary (cession-language vs. lease-language with the Tausug term pajak); the dispute is genuine and ongoing, and either characterization presented without qualification misrepresents the source.
QUARANTINED: That the Bates Treaty was a recognition of Sulu sovereignty in good faith. U.S. internal correspondence treated it from the outset as a temporary expedient to neutralize the Sultanate while operations against Aguinaldo proceeded, with full intent to abrogate when convenient.
QUARANTINED: That Bud Dajo (March 1906) was a battle in any conventional military sense. It was the destruction of an extended-family civilian community of approximately 600–1,000 persons, including women and children, by U.S. forces using mountain artillery against a defenseless target.
QUARANTINED: That the present Bangsamoro political claim is a 20th-century construction discontinuous with the historical Sultanate. It is the contemporary expression of the substrate sovereignty whose continuity through the Sultanate, the colonial period, and the post-independence era is documented in Stories 1 through 4.
QUARANTINED: That Philippine sovereignty over the Sulu archipelago was lawfully transferred from Spain to the United States in 1898. Spain transferred only what Spain held; effective Spanish control over Sulu was always partial and contested. The 1898 transfer is a formal legal act whose substantive content is significantly thinner than the diplomatic document suggests.

Primary sources: Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898); Bates Treaty (August 20, 1899); Carpenter Memorandum Agreement (March 22, 1915); the 1878 Sulu instrument concerning North Borneo (English and Malay-Arabic versions); Mark Twain, “Comments on the Moro Massacre” (1906); U.S. military reports on Bud Dajo, March 1906. Secondary: James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 2nd ed. (2007); Samuel K. Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle, 1900–1972 (1977); Peter Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920 (1977); Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973); Thomas McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels (1998); Patricio Abinales, Making Mindanao (2000); Joshua Gedacht, “Mohammedan Religion Made It Necessary to Fire”: Massacres on the American Imperial Frontier from South Dakota to the Southern Philippines,” in McCoy & Scarano (eds.), Colonial Crucible (2009); R. J. May, “The Bangsamoro: Origins and Development of an Idea,” in Wadi (ed.), Politics of Identity in the Bangsamoro (2008); Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (2014); Republic Act No. 11054, Bangsamoro Organic Law (2018). Internal cross-references: see “The Sulu Zone” for the 1663–1848 period that preceded and made possible the events of this story; “Three Centuries of Moro Resistance” for the broader anti-colonial frame of which Sulu’s story is a part.